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takyon writes:

U.S. Bill Allocates $30 Million To Help Hong Kong Bypass China's Great Firewall Internet Restrictions

In a piece of legislation currently being considered by the United States Senate, the U.S. government will allocate $30 million to enable Hong Kong residents to bypass China's Great Firewall. While residents of one of the most densely populated and developed cities in the world are not directly surveilled by the firewall, a controversial National Security Law which was enforced last year bred fears that the region's internet regulation policies would come to mirror those in Mainland China, where the Great Firewall restricts access to internet platforms such as Google and Facebook.

[...] The bill, officially dubbed the United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 (USICA), allocates $30 million in funds starting from the next fiscal year. Its Section 3309 aims to aid in developing technologies and programs for an "open, interoperable, reliable and secure internet" for Hong Kong residents.

It then lists down the objectives that this funding will have to achieve. These objectives include diversifying the portfolio of technologies at the disposal of the U.S. government for combating internet censorship.

AnonTechie writes:

Humans probably can't live longer than 150 years, new research finds:

Science is once again casting doubt on the idea that we could live to be nearly as old as the biblical Methuselah or Mel Brooks' famous 2,000-year-old man.

New research from Singapore-base biotech company Gero looks at how well the human body bounces back from disease, accidents or just about anything else that puts stress on its systems. This basic resilience declines as people age, with an 80-year-old requiring three times as long to recover from stresses as a 40-year-old on average.

[...] Extrapolate this decline further, and human body resilience is completely gone at some age between 120 and 150, according to new analysis performed by the researchers. In other words, at some point your body loses all ability to recover from pretty much any potential stressor. The study's conclusion that the body loses all ability to cope -- or at least to recover -- from stress before age 150 is line with the conclusions of similar studies, including one from last year that pegged the maximum possible human age at 138 years.

The full study [PDF] is published and available to the public in the open journal Nature Communications.

I think that quality of life is much more important than number of years. Would you like to live longer?

Journal References:
1.) Dmitriy I. Podolskiy, Andrei Avanesov, Alexander Tyshkovskiy, et al. The landscape of longevity across phylogeny [$], bioRxiv (DOI: 10.1101/2020.03.17.995993)
2.) Aleksandr Zenin, Yakov Tsepilov, Sodbo Sharapov, et al. Identification of 12 genetic loci associated with human healthspan [open], Communications Biology (DOI: 10.1038/s42003-019-0290-0)
3.) Timothy V. Pyrkov, Ilya S. Sokolov, Peter O. Fedichev. Deep longitudinal phenotyping of wearable sensor data reveals independent markers of longevity, stress, and resilience [$], medRxiv (DOI: 10.1101/2020.12.24.20248672)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

A two-year old from California is the youngest American to become a member of Mensa:

Kashe Quest may be a two-year-old but her skills include naming all of the elements on the periodic table, identifying all 50 states by shape and location, learning Spanish and deciphering patterns, according to her parents.

"She has always shown us, more than anything, the propensity to explore her surroundings and to ask the question 'Why,'" Kashe's father Devon Athwal told CNN. "If she doesn't know something, she wants to know what it is and how does it function, and once she learns it, she applies it."

The Athwals said that as soon as Kashe said her first word, her skills developed rapidly. Soon she was speaking in sentences that contained five or more words.

Through their daily observations, it struck the family that their daughter might be advanced for her age.

A 4m15s video on YouTube shows her in action.

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AnonTechie writes:

Three years younger in just eight weeks? A new study suggests yes!:

A groundbreaking clinical trial shows we can reduce biological age (as measured by the Horvath 2013 DNAmAge clock) by more than three years in only eight weeks with diet and lifestyle through balancing DNA methylation.

A first-of-its-kind, peer-reviewed study provides scientific evidence that lifestyle and diet changes can deliver immediate and rapid reduction of our biological age. Since aging is the primary driver of chronic disease, this reduction has the power to help us live better, longer.

The study, released on April 12, utilized a randomized controlled clinical trial conducted among 43 healthy adult males between the ages of 50-72. The 8-week treatment program included diet, sleep, exercise and relaxation guidance, and supplemental probiotics and phytonutrients, resulting in a statistically significant reduction of biological age--over three years younger, compared to controls.

The study was independently conducted by the Helfgott Research Institute, with laboratory assistance from Yale University Center for Genome Analysis, and the results independently analyzed at McGill University and the National University of Natural Medicine.

Journal Reference:
Kara N. Fitzgerald, Romilly Hodges, Douglas Hanes, et al. Potential reversal of epigenetic age using a diet and lifestyle intervention: a pilot randomized clinical trial. Aging, 2021; 13 (7): 9419 DOI: 10.18632/aging.202913

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takyon writes:

Google's 80-acre megacampus will take over a chunk of San Jose - Google does not yet know the cost of the 10- to 30-year construction project

Google has gotten approval to build a "multi-billion dollar megacampus" in San Jose, California, just 10 miles away from the other giant campus the company is building in Mountain View. CNBC reports that city officials approved Google's "Downtown West" project on Tuesday night.

Google's sales pitch describes the development as a "mixed-use urban destination" built around the Diridon Station transit hub. When the project is completed, Google will own an 80-acre chunk of land that will have 7.3 million square feet of office space, 4,000 housing units, 15 acres of "parks, plazas, and green space," and 500,000 square feet dedicated to "retail, cultural, arts, education, hotels and more." One thousand of the 4,000 houses will be designated as "affordable" housing. Google's San Jose development director, Alexa Aren, described the project as "much less the corporate campus" and more like "a resilient neighborhood." It sounds like it's essentially going to be a Google Town that employees can live and work in.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Navy's experimental drone ship passes through Panama Canal:

May 20 (UPI) -- Nomad, an experimental unmanned surface vehicle, passed through the Panama Canal en route to its new home port in California, the Navy confirmed.

USNI News reported that ship spotters had found evidence of the vessel's passage through the Panama Canal using data from MarineTraffic.com, and that a Navy official had confirmed the transit.

The Navy did not provide comment on the transit, but web cameras at the Miraflores locks on the canal showed that Nomad -- a retrofitted offshore patrol vessel -- was heading toward the Pacific as of Tuesday night.

Ship spotters said the Nomad was underway in the Gulf Coast and traveled as far away as Norfolk, Va., for testing.

The real ghost guns!

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mrpg writes:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210514134119.htm

Climate change is exacerbating problems like habitat loss and temperatures swings that have already pushed many animal species to the brink. But can scientists predict which animals will be able to adapt and survive? Using genome sequencing, researchers show that some fish, like the threespine stickleback, can adapt very rapidly to extreme seasonal changes. Their findings could help scientists forecast the evolutionary future of these populations.

Journal Reference:

Alan Garcia‐Elfring, Antoine Paccard, Timothy J. Thurman, Ben A. Wasserman, Eric P. Palkovacs, Andrew P. Hendry, Rowan D. H. Barrett. Using seasonal genomic changes to understand historical adaptation to new environments: Parallel selection on stickleback in highly‐variable estuaries. Molecular Ecology, 2021; 30 (9): 2054 DOI: 10.1111/mec.15879

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for aristarchus:

Lopsided Galaxy NGC 2276:

The magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 2276 looks a bit lopsided in this Hubble Space Telescope snapshot. A bright hub of older yellowish stars normally lies directly in the center of most spiral galaxies. But the bulge in NGC 2276 looks offset to the upper left.

What's going on?

In reality, a neighboring galaxy to the right of NGC 2276 (NGC 2300, not seen here) is gravitationally tugging on its disk of blue stars, pulling the stars on one side of the galaxy outward to distort the galaxy's normal fried-egg appearance.

This sort of "tug of war" between galaxies that pass close enough to feel each other's gravitational pull is not uncommon in the universe. But, like snowflakes, no two close encounters look exactly alike.

In addition, newborn and short-lived massive stars form a bright, blue arm along the upper left edge of NGC 2276. They trace out a lane of intense star formation. This may have been triggered by a prior collision with a dwarf galaxy. It could also be due to NGC 2276 plowing into the superheated gas that lies among galaxies in galaxy clusters. This would compress the gas to precipitate into stars, and trigger a firestorm of starbirth.

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aristarchus writes:

Flying has never been a safe or precise art. Even when it is not on Mars! Latest from the Ingenuity saga, from NASA it's own self.

On the 91st Martian day, or sol, of NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter performed its sixth flight. The flight was designed to expand the flight envelope and demonstrate aerial-imaging capabilities by taking stereo images of a region of interest to the west. Ingenuity was commanded to climb to an altitude of 33 feet (10 meters) before translating 492 feet (150 meters) to the southwest at a ground speed of 9 mph (4 meters per second). At that point, it was to translate 49 feet (15 meters) to the south while taking images toward the west, then fly another 164 feet (50 meters) northeast and land.

Telemetry from Flight Six shows that the first 150-meter leg of the flight went off without a hitch. But toward the end of that leg, something happened: Ingenuity began adjusting its velocity and tilting back and forth in an oscillating pattern. This behavior persisted throughout the rest of the flight. Prior to landing safely, onboard sensors indicated the rotorcraft encountered roll and pitch excursions of more than 20 degrees, large control inputs, and spikes in power consumption.

[...] Approximately 54 seconds into the flight, a glitch occurred in the pipeline of images being delivered by the navigation camera. This glitch caused a single image to be lost, but more importantly, it resulted in all later navigation images being delivered with inaccurate timestamps. From this point on, each time the navigation algorithm performed a correction based on a navigation image, it was operating on the basis of incorrect information about when the image was taken. The resulting inconsistencies significantly degraded the information used to fly the helicopter, leading to estimates being constantly "corrected" to account for phantom errors. Large oscillations ensued.

Large oscillations are better than small ones, if the truth be told. Godspeed, Ingenuity!

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Ohio lawmakers want to abolish vaccine requirements:

[...] Lawmakers are working on legislation to call off the lottery immediately. They're also trying to head off any plans for "vaccine passports." And last month, they introduced a sweeping antivaccination bill that would essentially demolish public health and vaccination requirements in the state—and not just requirements for COVID-19 vaccines, requirements for any vaccine.

[...] State Rep. Beth Liston (D-Dublin) blasted the bill, telling The Columbus Dispatch, "Not only would it prevent schools, businesses and communities from putting safety measures in pace related to COVID, it will impact the health of our children... This bill applies to all vaccines—polio, measles, meningitis, etc. If it becomes law we will see worsening measles outbreaks, meningitis in the dorms, and children once again suffering from polio."

[...] "At its core, this proposal would destroy our current public health framework that prevents outbreaks of potentially lethal diseases, threatens the stability of our economy as it recovers from a devastating pandemic and jeopardizes the way we live, learn, work and celebrate life," the letter said.

[...] "HB 248 would put all Ohioans at risk while increasing the cost of health care for families, individuals and businesses," spokesperson Dan Williamson said. "This proposal applies to all immunizations, including childhood vaccines. If passed, this legislation could reverse decades of immunity from life-threatening, but vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, hepatitis, meningitis and tuberculosis."

Also: Ohio GOP lawmakers, citing 'need to protect' from vaccines, seek to expand exemptions, nix COVID passports

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Beryllium Sphere (r) writes:

Up to now, people have been discouraged from getting antibody tests to measure what their COVID vaccination did. The reasoning behind that advice is that since nobody knew what a given level meant in actionable terms, it was not useful information.

That just changed.

Nature has published the results of research into the relationship between antibody levels post-vaccination and vaccine efficacy, with plenty of different vaccines.

An easy-to-read overview is at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01372-6

The full paper, with the methodology and conclusions, is at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01377-8 (It looks like careful work but it's over my head in places.)

The bottom line is that they found a clear correlation and protection levels keep going up as antibody levels go up, though there's some diminishing returns at the very top end where the mRNA vaccines are.

The cool part is they figured out what antibody level would give you the 50% protection that we would have been willing to accept from a vaccine. The mRNA vaccines leave you with an order of magnitude more. That's quite a comforting safety factor against variants and gradual decline.

Journal References:
1.) Smriti Mallapaty. Scientists zero in on long-sought marker of COVID-vaccine efficacy, (DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-01372-6)
2.) David S. Khoury, Deborah Cromer, Arnold Reynaldi, et al. Neutralizing antibody levels are highly predictive of immune protection from symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection [open], Nature Medicine (DOI: 10.1038/s41591-021-01377-8)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Mars Helicopter Suffered Glitch During Flight, Forced Emergency Landing:

During its sixth flight across the desolate Martian surface earlier this month, NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter experienced a bit of a software glitch.

The tiny four pound rotorcraft "began adjusting its velocity and tilting back and forth in an oscillating pattern" according to an official update, just after covering just over 500 feet.

The event forced it to make an emergency landing some 16 feet away from the intended touchdown site.

[...] Ingenuity is capable of adjusting control inputs 500 times per second thanks to a sophisticated inertial measurement unit (IMU) that can track its accelerations and rotation rates.

In addition to this IMU, Ingenuity uses its navigation camera to see where it is going and where it currently is. Unfortunately, 54 seconds into its sixth flight, a glitch occurred in the pipeline of images taken by this navigation camera, as Grip explained.

"This glitch caused a single image to be lost, but more importantly, it resulted in all later navigation images being delivered with inaccurate timestamps," Grip wrote in the update. That means the helicopter was "operating on the basis of incorrect information about when the image was taken."

Also at c|net

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Asahi Linux Dev Reveals 'M1RACLES' Flaw in Apple M1, Pokes Fun at Similar Flaws

Asahi Linux developer Hector Martin has revealed a covert channel vulnerability in the Apple M1 chip that he dubbed M1RACLES, and in the process, he's gently criticized the way security flaws have started to be shared with the public.

Martin's executive summary for M1RACLES sounds dire: "A flaw in the design of the Apple Silicon 'M1' chip allows any two applications running under an OS to covertly exchange data between them, without using memory, sockets, files, or any other normal operating system features. This works between processes running as different users and under different privilege levels, creating a covert channel for surreptitious data exchange. [...] The vulnerability is baked into Apple Silicon chips, and cannot be fixed without a new silicon revision." (Emphasis his.)

He also noted that this was the result of an intentional decision on Apple's part. "Basically, Apple decided to break the ARM spec by removing a mandatory feature, because they figured they'd never need to use that feature for macOS," he explained. "And then it turned out that removing that feature made it much harder for existing OSes to mitigate this vulnerability." The company would have to make a change on the silicon level with its followup to the M1 to mitigate this flaw.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Sleep Evolved Before Brains. Hydras Are Living Proof.:

The hydra is a simple creature. Less than half an inch long, its tubular body has a foot at one end and a mouth at the other. The foot clings to a surface underwater — a plant or a rock, perhaps — and the mouth, ringed with tentacles, ensnares passing water fleas. It does not have a brain, or even much of a nervous system.

And yet, new research shows, it sleeps. Studies by a team in South Korea and Japan showed that the hydra periodically drops into a rest state that meets the essential criteria for sleep.

On the face of it, that might seem improbable. For more than a century, researchers who study sleep have looked for its purpose and structure in the brain. They have explored sleep's connections to memory and learning. They have numbered the neural circuits that push us down into oblivious slumber and pull us back out of it. They have recorded the telltale changes in brain waves that mark our passage through different stages of sleep and tried to understand what drives them. Mountains of research and people's daily experience attest to human sleep's connection to the brain.

But a counterpoint to this brain-centric view of sleep has emerged. Researchers have noticed that molecules produced by muscles and some other tissues outside the nervous system can regulate sleep. Sleep affects metabolism pervasively in the body, suggesting that its influence is not exclusively neurological. And a body of work that's been growing quietly but consistently for decades has shown that simple organisms with less and less brain spend significant time doing something that looks a lot like sleep. Sometimes their behavior has been pigeonholed as only "sleeplike," but as more details are uncovered, it has become less and less clear why that distinction is necessary.

It appears that simple creatures — including, now, the brainless hydra — can sleep. And the intriguing implication of that finding is that sleep's original role, buried billions of years back in life's history, may have been very different from the standard human conception of it. If sleep does not require a brain, then it may be a profoundly broader phenomenon than we supposed.

takyon writes:

Marvell Announces First PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD Controllers: Up To 14 GB/s

Today Marvell is announcing the first NVMe SSD controllers to support PCIe 5.0, and a new branding strategy for Marvell's storage controllers. The new SSD controllers are the first under the umbrella of Marvell's Bravera brand, which will also encompass HDD controllers and other storage accelerator products. The Bravera SC5 family of PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers will consist of two controller models: the 8-channel MV-SS1331 and the 16-channel MV-SS1333.

These new SSD controllers roughly double the performance available from PCIe 4.0 SSDs, meaning sequential read throughput hits 14 GB/s and random read performance of around 2M IOPS. To reach this level of performance while staying within the power and thermal limits of common enterprise SSD form factors, Marvell has had to improve power efficiency by 40% over their previous generation SSD controllers. That goes beyond the improvement that can be gained simply from smaller fab process nodes, so Marvell has had to significantly alter the architecture of their controllers. The Bravera SC5 controllers still include a mix of Arm cores (Cortex-R8, Cortex-M7 and a Cortex-M3), but now includes much more fixed-function hardware to handle the basic tasks of the controller with high throughput and consistently low latency.

Top-of-the-line PCIe 4.0 controllers from Phison and Silicon Motion are capable of 7.4 GB/s of sequential reads.

Related: Marvell Looking to Integrate Machine Learning Engines Onto SSD Controllers
Marvell Announces ThunderX3, an ARM Server CPU With 96 Cores, 384 Threads
Marvell ThunderX3 ARM Server CPU Will Have Up to 60 Cores Per Die, with 96-Core Dual-Die Option
Silicon Motion Launches PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Controllers

Original Submission